Firefox Handly Feature - Web Page Search

Recently I wrote an blog entry on Firefox, and a commenter indicated that Firefox was an incredible tool in which Microsoft's IE 7 was a tool that made things harder to do.

Well, here is a concrete example of the difference between IE 7 and FireFox.

When you are on a web page and hit control-F to find text on that page what happens?

In IE 7 (and previous versions, this functionality appears to have avoided update) a small dialog window pops up over your page covering some of the text you are going to search. You type in what you want to search for and the page scrolls to the text and moves your search window down. It highlights the text, but it isn't entirely what I want in a search tool. You can close the search tool as necessary to stop it from blocking the text, but to start up the search again you have to control-F to bring it back up.

Firefox will perform actions that at first you might think are similar to the IE 7 way of handling searches.

Firefox will open an extended status bar, with an entry box for your search text. You type in to it what you are looking for and hit next. It scrolls the web page as necessary and highlights the text. You can hit the next or previous button as necessary to continue your search of go back to a previous search hit. The search bar on the browser does not block any text. It stays at the bottom of the screen waiting if you need it again - it need not go away for you to read a paragraph of text.

It is a vital difference (to me) in blocking or not blocking text when I'm performing a search on a web page. Why? Because I fully expect to read the paragraph where the hit happened to determine if what was found is what I need or if I have to search again. On the IE 7 model (or just IE for the past 10 years...) this involves more actions on my part to clear up the text to read what I'm looking for - either moving the dialog window or closing it completely. This works out to be a huge annoyance when what I was reading turns out to not be what I'm looking for and I have to re-open the search dialog.

So, definitely, score 5 points to Firefox for the previously mentioned session recovery capability. Score another 2 points to Firefox for making text searches of web pages easier.

Score: Firefox 2 - 7 , IE 7 - 0 .